Knowledge Management solutions that include language translation, localization, interpretation and research services for growing, transforming, and sustaining high performance enterprises, corporations, and governments for the new world of business.

Search

Main menu

Post navigation

Good Translations: Do They Exist Today?

What is a good translation in today’s global business world? How much do grammar, punctuation, and spelling affect it? And do sentence structure and vocabulary matter? Does quality depend on context and purpose? Does a generally accepted concept of a “good translation” even exist? And who cares anyway in a culture of tweets, texting and Internet messaging?

Critical in a Global Economy

These are important issues in today’s world when international business transactions, government decisions, medical procedures, legal judgments–to name a few areas–rely on words, their meanings, interpretations, sequence, and presentation. So, of course, a good translation is critical in a global economy. As an experienced Houston Spanish translation services worker expresses, “It is the medium and the means for many personal and public interactions and transactions, from crafting a trade contract and conducting diplomacy with friendly and unfriendly governments and factions to keeping a boss apprised of the progress of a project or ordering materials from a foreign supplier.”

Essential and Inescapable

It is inescapable and essential in today’s global business world. James Taylor, a provider of Dallas Translation Services believes that translation work establishes history in an organization because it validates and records decisions and actions, records progress in research towards a discovery or invention, provides evidence of innocence or guilt in legal cases, and conveys an organization’s goals, vision, and mission. It is an organization’s–or an individual’s–identity? It demonstrates competence, knowledge, effectiveness, and self-awareness. It is more powerful, more far-reaching, longer lasting, and more real than the spoken word. For these reasons, translators in today’s global economy must practice and produce “good translations.” They must address the questions posed at the beginning of this piece.

2 thoughts on “Good Translations: Do They Exist Today?”

A translation should be appropriate for the need. that is not an absolute; the required quality (obviously) varies with the ultimate usage.
If it’s interoffice communication that’s one thing, but if it will represent your company’s image to the buyer it had better be perfect. And that means hiring a translator who can not only understand the source, but write GOOD target language.
And that combination of skills generally comes at a price, because professionals make their living from it.
When you buy production equipment you consider much more than simply the cost… the same applies to translation.

Translation is undoubtedly the language apparatus through which the world communicate. A good translation should take into account the linguistic, cultural, legal and all intrinsic specifications of each SLT. Problems or difficulties widen whenever the translating materiel is rising from general to more technical translation subjects.